A goal in the manufacture of electronic equipment is the decrease of electrical consumption in the manufactured electronic equipment. This is particularly true in fields where an infrequent need for recharging is an advantage, such as, for example, in the field of mobile telephony.
In periods of high activity, the power consumption of processors may be high. In periods of low activity, for example, in standby periods, power consumption may drop significantly (e.g. compared to power consumption during periods of high activity). However, even in periods of low activity, leakage currents remain, which then form a significant share of the total power consumption of the processor in periods of low activity. The total value of these leakage currents may be related to the number of transistors present in the processor and is, therefore, all the more significant when the computational power of the processor is great, that is to say, when the processor possesses a large number of transistors.
To attenuate energy loss during periods of low activity, the leakage currents may, for example, be decreased by lowering the supply current when on standby. It would, nonetheless, be desirable to further decrease the consumption of the processor in periods of low activity.